The Radical and the Republican

A former slave turned writer, orator, and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass was a radical reformer who campaigned widely and passionately for the end of slavery in the United States and for the ability of African-Americans to be treated as the equal of their white counterparts.

After escaping from slavery in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write. He published countless articles and three autobiographies during his life, with each book being massively different from the next in the way in which he approached his experiences as a slave, his abolitionist work, and the way he saw politics in America. Over time, he grew to be less radical and to work more with mainstream politics as a member of the Republican Party.

Douglass was known to often take contradictory positions on issues, for example, being anti-Lincoln one minute and pro-Lincoln the next. However, he justified this by the nature of his work as a reformer, believing that it was his duty to be at the tip of the spear on issues rather than appease an elected constituency. Originally a pacifist, apolitical follower of William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass eventually moved on to believe that politics were a necessary evil for achieving emancipation for slaves. His position greatly changed when he publicly lauded the radical revolutionary John Brown for his raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, but he later cooled his position, ultimately siding with Lincoln on many issues.

Douglass believed that it was not enough for African-Americans to be freed, but that they must also be given equal rights, American citizenship, and the right to vote in order for slavery to truly be eradicated in the South. He felt that if this was not done, the whites in power in the South would simply enact legislation that re-enslaved African-Americans by other means. Sadly, with the assassination of Lincoln, he proved to be correct in his fear.

Stephan Douglas was the Democratic Senator from Illinois who famously engaged Abraham Lincoln in four debates leading up to the 1858 Senatorial election. Considered one of the most important moments in American history, the “Lincoln-Douglas Debates,” as they came to be known, highlighted the growing issue of slavery and its expansion within the established states of the Union and the new territories being added to it. A proponent of slavery, Douglas believed that it was the people of each state who should decide whether or not slavery would be permitted within the state, while Lincoln wanted a halt to any further expansion of slavery within the new territories, though he did not oppose it where it had been already established.

A powerful figure in national politics, Douglas defeated Lincoln in 1858 and continued to work through Congress to maintain the status quo of slavery, which would lead to the Civil War in 1861. Ironically, it was Lincoln who defeated Douglas in 1860 to become president of the United States.

Promoting the immediate end to slavery in the United States, Garrison was a Northern liberal social reformer and journalist. He published The Liberator, a widely circulated abolitionist newspaper, and, as early as 1832, he organized the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He believed that slavery had so corrupted the moral fiber of the United States that to engage in politics was to sully one’s self; thus, he was a proponent of working for change from the outside, through writing and public speaking. One of his early followers counted Frederick Douglass, who ultimately left Garrison’s flock for believing that Garrison’s pacifistic approach towards abolition was not radical or active enough to make a real impact on the issue.

A member of the Free-Soil Party, Smith was an American politician and social reformer for whom Frederick Douglass went to work and support after his break with William Lloyd Garrison and Garrisonian doctrine. A leading proponent that the constitution was an anti-slavery document, the position that he ultimately converted Douglass to, and one which would form the bedrock of Douglass’s writings for subsequent years to come.

An American statesman from Kentucky, Clay served in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, where he gained the nickname “The Great Compromiser” for his ability to diffuse hot-button issues. Idolized by Abraham Lincoln, much of Clay’s doctrine found its way into Lincoln’s political writings and platforms. Famed for the Compromise of 1850, which was five different bills meant to handle how the territories annexed by the United States following the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The heart of the compromise rested with the way in which slavery was either to be expanded or curtailed in the United States. However, it only served to create a dangerous status quo that would be massively undermined by the Dred Scott Decision in 1857.

Although an abolitionist, Clay felt neither that blacks and whites were equal nor that they could ever truly coexist. As such, he founded the American Colonization Society in 1816 in order to assist freed blacks in emigrating to their ancestral homelands in Africa. For many later abolitionists, the idea of colonization was still seen as a viable option for how to handle freed slaves, and one supporter even counted Abraham Lincoln, although he later saw how infeasible the idea was in reality.

A former Union General appointed by Abraham Lincoln in 1861 as commander-in-chief of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln later relieved McClellan in 1862 believing that the general was too cautious in his approach towards Robert E. Lee’s Army of Norther Virginia. McClellan was known as a great planner, and although he did not suffer any major defeats at the hand of Lee, he often failed to exploit Northern advantage and squandered opportunities to pursue Lee’s Army, most notably after the Battle of Antietam.

In 1864 McClellan served as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. He ran on a compromise position and promised, if elected, to end the Civil War and negotiate a peace with the South.

The Fifth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Taney served from 1836 until his death in 1864. Taney is most famous for his decision in Scott vs. Sandford in 1857. More commonly known as the Dred Scott Decision, Taney wrote that Scott, a slave suing to be free because his master had taken him into territory where slavery was illegal, had no right to sue because he was not a citizen of the United States. Additionally, he argued that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the new territories of the United States, thus gutting the bulk of the Compromise of 1850. Taney’s decision made it much more difficult not only for politicians like Lincoln to enact change and fight for abolition, but it also made it much more difficult for the average American to assist slaves and fugitive laws without aiding and abetting a crime.

A radical abolitionist, Brown believed that the only way to overthrow slavery in the United States was armed insurrection. Having become tired of the pacifist movement in the United States, Brown formed a mini-militia that was responsible for raiding and skirmishing with pro-slavery forces along the Kansas-Missouri border. Brown is most famous for his failed raid on the U.S. Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Believing that should they be armed, slaves would rise up against their masters in a great slave revolt, Brown and his cohort attacked the arsenal in October of 1859. However, although they managed to briefly seize the arsenal, the predicted uprising never occurred, and Brown was captured by U.S. forces under the command of Robert E. Lee. Tried and found guilty of treason, Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. Lauded by the romantic intelligentsia of the Northeast and by Frederick Douglass himself, Abraham Lincoln considered Brown to be a “madman” (95). The reaction of the two to this event highlights how differently the two men viewed going about fighting for emancipation in the United States.

An American author and statesman, Greeley was the founder and editor of The New York Tribune, a powerful liberal paper that gave voice to Frederick Douglass and which was vital to helping frame public opinion both prior to and during the Civil War. Greeley was a strong supporter of the Republican party, as he both founded and helped named it in 1854.

Vice-President of American under President Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson became the 17th President of the United States upon Lincoln’s assassination. Wildly different in character than his predecessor, Johnson was a slaveholding aristocrat from Tennessee who did not share Lincoln’s beliefs on how the end of slavery should be handled and how African-Americans should be brought into American public life. Feckless in his attempts to institute any type of reform or Reconstruction in the former Confederate States, Johnson was ultimately impeached by the Congress of the United States for the firing of Secretary of War, Edwin McMasters Stanton. He survived, but barely, and was defeated by Ulysses S. Grant in 1868.

One of the primary problems was that Johnson was a Democrat who had been chosen by Lincoln as a means of trying to unify the Northern democrats behind his election in 1864. Because of this, Lincoln and Johnson held antithetical views on nearly everything, as Johnson had much more in common with the pro-slavery Democrats in the South and was a slaveholding member of a border state.

An African-American slave, Dred Scott sued his master for his freedom and that of his wife and two daughters in 1857. The case, officially known as Scott vs. Sanford and popularly referred to as the Dred Scott Decision, was a landmark ruling in the United States of America, with the Supreme Court ruling 7-2 in favor of Scott’s master. This would have been nothing more than a small case had Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney not published such a vociferous opinion firmly cementing the legal precedent that slaves were not citizens and as such had none of the rights afforded to citizens of the United States. Moreover, although Scott’s case rested on the fact that he had been taken into a territory where slavery was illegal, to argue that he should be freed would deny the master of his property, his right to which trumped Scott’s right to freedom, as the master was a citizen and Scott was not.